It will be appreciated that the control of onscreen images in a computer environment is desirable in order to provide realtime interaction. One of the more difficult problems associated with the direction of character movement is when one seeks to optically detect hand gestures in real time. The time necessary to acquire or recognize the hand gesture, both in a cluttered environment and against a natural background, can exceed several seconds, a relatively long time for interactive applications.
During optical recognition of the hand gesture, it is oftentimes necessary to compare the digital images of the hand with a template so that a match can be made between the predetermined template and the hand gesture. In so doing, many multiplications must be performed resulting in a relatively large lag time for hand gesture recognition.
One such hand gesture recognition system is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/391,955 now U.S. Pat. No. 5,594,469 by William T.
Freeman and Craig D. Weissman, filed on Feb. 25, 1995 incorporated herein by reference. While the system described therein operates satisfactorily to uniquely determine particular hand gestures, there is nonetheless a need for a more simplified system which operates more quickly and accurately to detect hand gestures.
It is also a requirement, especially in the games industry, for an exceptionally inexpensive method for hand gesture recognition.